Posts by Vic

> Vic's Vap-o-rub, not so much.

It's "Vicks".

Nothing to do with me.

Vic.

> Oh, I see.

No, I don't think you do.

> So if you do a good turn you can commit a crime and expect a pardon.

No.

An *exceptional* person might occasionally be granted a pardon for an offence he has committed.

Any talk of expectation means you haven't grasped what a pardon is about; this isn't trading cards, it's the realisation by a state that, just very occasionally, someone warrants being let off something bad they *have* done because of the good stuff they have also done.

Vic.

> you don't negotiate with terrrists neither, right?

I would.

Frankie Boyle had a good take on that - his plan was simply to outbid the terrorists.

"What's Allah offering you boys, 100 virgins? We'll give you 50 slags."

Vic.

> Porting an OS to an completely different chip in 12 weeks is no mean feat.

That depends on how portable the OS was to start with.

And SF has a Darwin-on-ARM project dating back to 2006, so this isn't groundbreaking work.

Good work-experience project, though.

Vic.

> you're entitled to rebundle your work in a different format

That is actually the whole point of the article.

A previous version of the EULA laid claim to all versions - including pdf exports.

It is good that this restriction has gone away, but I still wouldn't be happy with what remains...

Vic.

> English is a derivative of a form of German.

No it isn't.

The Teutonic root is just one if the ancestors of English. The Romance root is the other biggie. And we have all sorts of other influences as well.

English has pillaged the best bits from the languages of all our invaders, and come up with something that, until very recently indeed, was quite astoundingly expressive.

It is just a shame that we are throwing away our grammar and vocabulary at such a rate :-(

Vic.

> dead happy with an Android app-auto-update to add malware.

You don't have to turn it on, you know.

It's selectable on a per-app basis. IIRC, it's also disabled if the app changes the permissions is requests.

I don't use it myself.

Vic.

> I don't think I've ever had a call/email along the lines of "I just wanted

> to say that your stuff is brilliant and I love it."

I put in a big order to CPC a while back. On delivery, it was short one small item (which I didn't need urgently anyway).

I called them and asked if they would put one in the post sometime. It turned up the next day by courier.

So I called Customer Service & asked to speak to a manager. I got a very resigned tone when she picked up the call. I told her the story, the name of the woman who had helped me, and how happy I was with the service.

And she had no idea what to do with my call. I suspect I might have been the first ever occurrence of praise :-)

Vic.

> Yes, Sony is a quality product

Actually, this is frequently not the case.

When I joined Sony, it had exactly that reputation; you'd pay more money for a Sony product, but you'd get better quality. But that quality was often illusory - inside the box would be exactly the same reference design that everyone else was using. The name sold the product.

I left Sony when I could no longer stand pumping out shite product with a premium price.

Vic.

> If anyone has a email tunnel-->SMTP converter

Errr - SMTP AUTH for inbound, and smarthost the outbound?

If your IP range is RBLed, either you've done something nefarious, or your upstream has been shown to be non-responsive when it comes to dealing with complaints.

It's a pain if you're caught[1] in this, but the alternative is much, much worse.

Vic.

[1] I got myself onto a blocklist a few weeks ago. I'd tried to mail from the command line on a machine where I'd forgotten to set up the domain name. When I put the machine on my own network, the mail was flushed through, and Google got my IP address put on a blocklist, where it remained for about twenty minutes. Silly mistake, easily fixed.

> on this side of the pond, it's 2-year contract or nothing

Are you living in the Land of the Free?

Sometimes it's easier getting by in the anachronism we have over on this side :-)

Vic.

> Increasing the range surely will bring in more punters?

...But fewer "zomg" headlines.

Which do you think matters more to BT?

Vic.

> In the future the phone will be the portal to work

Not without additional hardware, it won't.

A phone screen does not fill enough of my field of vision to make it appropriate for work. And the keyboard input methods - be they on-screen or slide-out - are insufficient. Additionally, the lack of a solid base means I can't type with all ten fingers[1].

This all ads up to a serious lack of bandwidth[2] between *me* and the machinery. That means it is ineffective as a work tool.

Vic.

[1] I'm including thumbs, for the pedants.

[2] I know typing speed isn't everything[3], But if I'm forever scrolling around looking for stuff and fighting the input method, my productivity would definitely suffer.

[3] An ex-colleague of mine had a brilliant phrase[4]: "A week's keyboard-bashing can sometimes preclude the need for an hour's thought" :-)

[4] Yes, I did mean it like that. Please don't be tempted to "correct" it, as that means you missed the joke.

> I down-voted this because I hate you and look for all your posts and click the red hate button.

This is real.

On a couple of occasions, I've posted on a contentious topic - and my posts aren't often all that inflammatory. Suddenly, all the posts listed on the first page of my profile get downvoted...

Other fora have limits on how many times you can vote for one individual before voting for others as well. This might be a nice addition, if it doesn't mean too much coding.

Vic.

> It starts very simply

If it were simple, do you think no-one would have done it?

> You have to conform fully to whatever standards you claim to comply with

Really? Do you realise that *most* code is not entirely standards-compliant, and deliberately so.

Years ago, I worked on a V.34 modem implementation. The standard required the call to be dropped in a number of circumstances; we reckoned to have about a 2% chance of getting the connection if we coded strictly to the standard. That's why no-one did; we put in re-tries. Everyone did. But under your rule, every modem would have to be recalled and replaced with something barely functional.

Got a software firewall? Most of them drop unwanted packets, rather than send RST as required by RFC793 (which opens you up to rapid port-scanning, and is a bad idea ). Under your rule, no-one would be permitted to sell such firewalls.

> It is the grown up thing to do

It most certainly is not. It's the plaintive cry from someone who's been bitten by crap software, but hasn't costed out the change from "good" code to "zero defect".

Vic.

> unless your PC / router/ radio / whatever is less than a metre from the meter

I use ZigBee kit alongside WiFi at very close proximity.

They don't interfere with each other. That's the neat thing about spread-spectrum[1].

Vic.

[1] Spread-spectrum techniques have been used to minimise/eliminate the propensity for jamming or interception since they were first introduced over a century ago. You can run a transmitter below the noise floor and still get your message across...

> Where the fk do they get these people?

It's Ben Bradshaw, the former Secretary of State that was so gushing in his praise of the NPfIT...

Vic.

> And your alleged exploit will not work for even the version 1.8 of sudo.

Errr - yes, it will. There are a number of versions where this exploit is real.

There shouldn't be any still in the wild, though. Many distros aren't using a 1.8 version at all, and those that are should have patched it by now (Fedora certainly has; I haven't checked the rest) because I'm not that interested.

Vic.

> that MS finally introduced the MOVE command for handling data.

It doesn't matter who introduced what - if you move data between two physically separate mass storage devices, you necessarily delete it from the first.

Vic.